Has the Paris Climate Agreement Ever Actually Mattered?

We know — the events of the Paris Climate Agreement went down in 2015. Which, at the rate of our current news cycle seems like forever ago.

But, as you may have noticed, the Agreement keeps popping up in headlines, in timelines, and across newsfeeds, often accompanied by strong opinions regarding its efficacy.

Rather than assessing the Agreement’s efficacy for themselves, however, the focus of many folks often shifts toward the incendiary — toward those strong opinions. Someone states a radical opinion, someone else chimes in, someone comes to the rescue of the initial poster but states an irrelevant fact from an untrustworthy source… you get it.

We’re not here to be incendiary. This article is a journey. It’s a pulling of threads in order to better understand how we’ve gotten here, and to answer the following questions: How much of a difference will the Paris Climate Agreement make in our struggle with climate change? And what impact will President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement actually have?

Let’s begin our journey with this video:

To Recap:

By 2015, global temperatures had risen over 1 degree celsius when compared to pre-industrial levels

195 nations met to discuss how best to tackle climate change on the governmental level

Nation-specific pledges such as this is called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), which basically means: each nation is on its own to figure out how they want to meet these goals

There will be a global stocktake every five years to assess the collective progress toward achieving the purpose of the Agreement and to inform further individual actions by Parties

After the Agreement was reached, world leaders applauded their efforts, and the efforts of their colleagues, as the Agreement was deemed a monumental achievement.

A few examples:

But…How?

It was no secret that climate change was going to be the topic of discussion at Conference of the Parties 21 (COP21). And, it was no secret that nations were going to be held individually accountable for the ways in which they’d approach overcoming climate change.

Most of all, it was no secret that it was going to be difficult to put ideas into motion. In fact, a lot of this groundwork had already been laid during previous meetings.

Take, for example, the Green Climate Fund. The GCF was created in 2010, and is essentially where governments of developed countries pool money together in order to assist governments of developing countries in responding to the challenge of climate change.

Because response to climate change is very, very expensive, we’re talking billions of dollars here.

And as the following video from Grist (uploaded to YouTube before the Paris Climate Agreement) helps illustrate, who exactly gets left flipping that bill?

All About the Benjamins

This question from the video pops out at us when considering the Paris Climate Agreement, but also the Green Climate Fund: What does it even mean to be a developing country?

To attempt answering that question, consider the following definitions from Cambridge Dictionary’s website:

developing country

noun

a country with little industrial and economic activity and where people generally have low incomes.

developed country

noun

a country with a lot of industrial activity and where people generally have high incomes.

Seems pretty straightforward, right? Almost pointless to put in here? Understandable. But, its inclusion here is important when understanding the perspectives of those opposing the Paris Climate Agreement. It’s important because, at the heart of so many arguments is money.

Where does it come from? What does it mean?

Why give our hard-earned cash to someone else when there are issues at home? And isn’t that the point of the Paris Agreement anyway — for countries to worry about themselves?

The last two questions have been at the heart of the Trump Administration’s argument, particularly in defense of its decision to remove the United States of American from the Paris Climate Agreement.

America Stands Alone

Unfair — that’s the word President Donald Trump uses to describe what the Paris Agreement is to the United States. And what he means is that staples of American business can’t thrive under the rules needed to reach the goals of the Agreement. Companies that employ thousands of American workers cannot implement changes quick enough, and, even if they could, they stand to lose money in the process. Which, in turn, would put American workers out of a job.

Within the withdrawal speech, President Trump also refers to how the Paris Agreement “punishes the United States… the world’s leader in environmental protection while imposing no meaningful obligations on the world’s leading polluters.”

He then turns his attention directly to China, and then to India, who “makes its participation contingent on receiving billions and billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid from developed countries.”

You guessed it — the Green Climate Fund is one such place from which developing countries like India receive funding, a fund President Trump says is “costing the United States a vast fortune.”

According to an article by BBC News swiftly after President Trump’s withdrawal, here’s a list of the countries that have pledged the most to the Green Climate Fund:

U.S. — $3 billion

Japan — $1.5 billion

U.K. — $1.2 billion

France — $1 billion

Germany — $1 billion

To be clear, “pledged” doesn’t mean “spent”. While the U.S. has pledged $3 billion, only $1 billion has been spent thus far, half of it coming three days before President Trump’s inauguration. And, because the money has to come from somewhere, it came this time around from the State Department’s Economic Support Fund, which, according to the same BBC News article, “finances a range of development, security, counter-terrorism and humanitarian projects to advance political and strategic initiatives.”

A politician in a powerful role and a nationalistic agenda will see that as a problem. Every day of the week.

President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement was a huge step — forward or backward depends on who you talk to.

One thing is clear, though: America stands alone in opposition of the Paris Agreement. All alone.

In September 2017, Nicaragua — one of two countries to not join the Agreement in 2015, due to their belief that the Agreement did not go far enough in sanctioning carbon emissions — announced its plans to join the Paris Agreement.

November 2017 saw Syria — the only other country that initially refused to join the Agreement — announce its intent to join the Paris Agreement.

Really, America stands alone. And here’s what folks have to say about it:

The Sides of Climate Change

If you take a moment to scroll through the three quotes at the beginning of this article, and then the three quotes just listed, the one constant you’ll find among them is that the words have been said by either a past or present politician. Which means that something like the Paris Agreement — the foremost global conversation going on about the reversal of, or the adaptation to, climate change — has no other choice but to be viewed through the lens of partisanism.

Fine. It is what it is. But climate change is here, and it’s going to get worse. Climate change has no political agenda and it sure as hell doesn’t care about what side any of us choose to stand upon.

The elephant in the room, then, is whether or not the Paris Agreement is worth all the anger and bickering. Is it effective? And does the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement actually matter?

The following video from PragerU begins to answer those questions:

What’s Next Then?

Okay, so, the Paris Agreement alone was never going to be the cure to climate change. That means the withdrawal of the United States — and all the fuss that has come as a result of the withdrawal — is pointless, right?

Wrong. The Paris Agreement matters. Even if it never could be the cure to climate change, it has. And the withdrawal of the United States, despite not immediately impacting the trajectory of the Paris Agreement, could prove to be catastrophic.

It’s true that, from a financial standpoint, the trillions of dollars being placed into a shared fund would produce better results as direct investments in, say, green energy innovation. That’s entirely fair to say. But two things about that:

There’s no guarantee that’s where ANY of the money saved by the United States’ withdrawal will be going under the Trump Administration.

The world pays close attention to what the United States does.

The world pays close attention, and some nations may in time end up following the lead of the United States, rendering the Paris Agreement’s symbol of global unity against the devastation of our lone planet moot.

And if a major polluter like the United States says, “Meh, I’m not too concerned about this,” how can we expect to actually save our planet?

By taking action. By making green choices day after day after day, until green is the norm and not some far-away-seeming thing. By investing what we can from our own incomes in green technologies.

We can bit by bit save this planet by kindly conversing with our neighbors about the boat we’re in together.

Think you learned a thing or two? Try your hand at the quiz below:

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